28

Geiléis

The mirror taunted her. She despised the woman there, a youthful vision in gold and white, staring back at her with defeated eyes. The look in those eyes said, You can’t do it. This will be just like the other times: first plans, then that terrified mixture of hope and dread, and then, once again, bitter defeat. She never intended you to break the curse. She meant it to go on forever. You will be older than the most ancient of tales, and I will still be in this mirror every time you look: the foolish young girl who ran through the woods at midnight to save her sweetheart. The girl who was stupid enough to think she could challenge the fey.

“It’s not true.” She turned her back on the mirror. “This time will be different.” Because Blackthorn was not Caisín, who had attempted the task the very first time and failed to make the slightest impression on the thorns, seeming to prove the curse a lie. It had been after that vain effort that Geiléis herself had tried, thinking that if one part of the curse was wrong, perhaps another part, the part that said she could not complete the task, might also be incorrect. She’d wondered, afterward, if Caisín had been less willing in her heart than in her words, and if the thorns had sensed that. But she’d kept the girl on. She could hardly ask Caisín’s husband and his fellow guards to make her disappear, and she knew Caisín would keep her mouth shut.

Blackthorn was not the village woman who had tried the second time, at fifty years; tried and balked at the threshold of the tower room, running back down the stair and out the door only to be caught up on the thorns, which had closed behind her after she cut her way through. As she’d screamed, they had shouted instructions from beyond the hedge: Use the knife to cut your clothing away from the thorns! Go back up! Finish the job! But the woman had been out of her mind with terror; she’d been beyond understanding the simplest command. Unable to get through the hedge themselves, unable to make her listen, they had left her there. By Midsummer Day she was dead, hanging limp and bloody among the thorns.

By the next opportunity, at a hundred years, that woman’s bones lay deep in the earth below the tower, entwined with the strong roots of the hedge. The Lady of Bann had paid a visit to the king of Tirconnell, begging for help, telling the tale of a monster come to terrorize the district and turn folk half-crazy with its wailing. The king had laughed at her. Mocked her. Humiliated her. She had wished, then, that she had the power to pronounce a curse. That summer she had used a young girl, a simpleton who did not fully understand the task. They promised her a new gown, a puppy and a bag of sweetmeats. She cut through the thorns and went up the tower. Not long after, they heard her falling down the stair. Perhaps she broke her neck and died straightaway; perhaps not. There was no way to tell.